August: Sunday Afternoon, But Make It 31 Days

A long, hot summer calls for a longer, hot(take-filled) Your Inside Voice. In this issue: Spies are everywhere. What it is to miss New Orleans, Smurfin' around. Condé, if you're Nast(y), & more.

Aug 03, 2025

Your Inside Voice is a curated cultural newsletter brought to you by Pragmatic, the IP/literary scouting advisory that helps film & tv producers find, acquire, and develop material for the screen.

THE MAIN COURSE

SHEEPDOGS by Elliot Ackerman | Knopf, August 5, 2025

We’re cheating a bit this week—though if we hadn’t said anything you’d probably never know. Our duplicitous act? Secretly slipping in a Sommelier’s Pick as the Main Course because it so perfectly pairs with a story on screen that we’ve quite loved for a while. We were inspired to choose this month’s Main Course by a recent dip into a few episodes of Paramount+’s Michael Fassbender-starrer, The Agency.

The Agency is moody, tense, and introspective—it’s a solid American representation of the 2015-2020 French series from which it is adapted, the Éric Rochant-created Le Bureau des Lègendes. This original show is, without un petit peu de doute, one of the very best scripted television shows ever made (we’re open to debate, but we’ll win). Exploring the lives and missions of a group of agents in France’s DGSE—the CIA but trés français(okay, okay, we’ll stop with the French puns!)—it’s a slow burning, suspenseful spy drama that somehow manages to be both globetrotting (Paris to the Middle East to Eastern Europe and beyond) and deeply, achingly personal.

Le Bureau is carried by characters so richly drawn that it’s a minor miracle (and a testament to Rochant’s storytelling prowess) the series isn’t based on a book. Threaded through the show—and what makes it so ineffable, perhaps—is its Frenchness. It’s a spy series, but it’s a spy series rooted in a culture and a nationality with tall their complicated histories and practices, exploring the ways that the stories nations and cultures tell about and to themselves influence the intensely personal relationships that express their values.

The Agency doesn’t stray much from the plot of Le Bureau, and that fact is a credit to its creative team. Why fix something that isn’t broken? But there is something lost (or perhaps just changed!) in translation that renders a different experience for the viewer. The moodiness, the tension, the introspection—they all still very Continental, even in this expertly and expensively produced Hollywood production. It still feels very much like a European take on the spy genre.

But to be quite honest, we weren’t thinking about Le Bureau or The Agency when we first read this month’s pick, Sheepdogs by Elliot Ackerman, as a partial manuscript (shhhh…don’t tell his agents) last spring.

We were just having a good time with two down-on-their-luck former CIA agents who find themselves deep in it when they take a gig to repossess a jet from Uganda, and find less money (i.e. none) and more trouble than they bargained for. But we finished the full read recently (it was long ago optioned by Apple/Playtone), it was striking to experience it in the midst of The Agency’s run on Paramount+.

Then it hit us: Sheepdogs shares the bones of a Le Bureau-style spy thriller, but its heart beats to a distinctly American rhythm.

Like its French counterpart, Sheepdogs plays with identity—code names, cover stories, double lives. But where Le Bureau turns inward, probing the psychological cost of espionage, Sheepdogs pushes outward. Its characters, nuanced yet brash, wear their damage on their sleeves. They’re louder. Bolder. More... American. And fun, in a wholly different way. Namely: what if Carl Hiaasen tackled the spycraft of Le Bureau.

Once you’ve finished this read, an expertly-subtitled Le Bureau is there waiting to hijack your weekend with fifty (!) episodes. You’ll forgive us for being jealous of what you’ve got in store on the page and the screen in these dog days of summer.

YOUR SOMMELIER’S PAIRING

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M. Broom | Grove Press

August 29th marks twenty years since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina inflicted previously unimaginable tragedy upon a major American city and changed it—and America—forever. There will be much said on screens and pages about this tragic anniversary in the days and weeks to come, but first out of the gate is a NatGeo docuseries from Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media and director Traci Curry, Hurricane Katrina: The Race Against Time.

It combines found footage from survivors with contemporary interviews and news clips that paint a damning picture of the institutional response to the storm. But mostly, this is a profoundly human story of disaster, survival, resilience, and evolution. It’s a must-watch for anyone who loves New Orleans.

And when you’re done watching, might we suggest diving into Sarah M. Broom’s 2019 National Book Award-winning book, The Yellow House. It’s as much her own memoir as it is her family, and, most of all, the yellow house in New Orleans East—far from the tourist-filled French Quarter—that they called home. The full texture and geography of the city are revealed through Broom’s family story, and each chapter is more thought-provoking than the one before. This is one to keep on the nightstand and savor one chapter at a time.

THE CHEESE COURSE

Spotted outside Pragmatic’s Brussels outpost. 10/10 would watch André’s take on The Smurfs sequel.

DESSERT

The Once and Future Condé Nast by Charlotte Klein | New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

Your Insider Voice readers will remember Graydon Carter’s recently published memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. It was, after all, our April Monthly Book pick. Then, July brought us New York Times correspondent Michael Grynbaum’s broader and deeper look at the lore of Condé Nast’s rise and former prominence, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.

Of course, there’s also the new podcast The Nasty, from former GQ articles editor Mark Healy. And an argument could be made that the first mover of this wave of 2020s Condé Nast nostalgia was the 2022 memoir by former deputy editor of Vanity Fair Dana Brown, Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster, which is on its way to becoming a Jeff Daniels-led series on Apple TV+.

A fair bit of this demand stems from nostalgia for more abundant economic times in the media industry. Early aughts’ $500k freelance contracts and idling black cars for everyone vanished, spawning on Silicon Valley campuses as reasons to never leave the office (remember the innocent days of not realizing that the reason they put the gym and dry cleaners and cafeteria and child care at work was to give you no reason to ever leave work?).

And the 2020s are giving… dust, except for an ever present, foreboding sense of doom hurtling from any number of sociopolitical directions. Oh, and return to office mandates.

Then there’s the matter of the oft-forgotten Gen X (cough, cough), who came of era at the tail end of the golden age of media and entertainment. There’s an entire cohort of creative industry-types toiling away as the world has shifted out from under them and disappeared the payoff that was always promised before the end of their careers.

But it seems that the confluence of all of these expressions of the Condé Nast story at this particular moment—and with such ferocity and volume—suggests something deeper and perhaps more terrifying is afoot. The business of storytelling is again facing an existential reordering that could cause anyone to want to retreat into the faint memories of industries past.

Ever since Amazon became a one stop shop for nearly every book ever printed, book publishing has known that discoverability would present a challenge.

Then, for both publishing and Hollywood, social media and changing print and video consumption habits further eroded the ability of studios, publishers, and their marketing departments to efficiently meet readers and audiences where they were.

Now, we face the possibility that robots will replace the tellers of stories the way the algorithm seems to have replaced the marketer of stories. Each day seems to bring new news of another step toward the inevitable: books written by ChatGPT prompt; movie and TV studios spinning up entire projects without much need for human writers or actors or filmmakers, voices instead of physical actors; or even AI-generated viral TikTok skits (this is already happening, and many of them are certifiably bonkers and racist).

All of this—a political and social reality that feels absolutely out of anyone’s control, and generative AI making itself at home in the hallowed halls of American culture (to say nothing of our collectively fried attention span) and the fact that no one seems to have a plan—suggests that whatever’s coming next couldn’t possibly be good.

And then, all of a sudden, we’re all one of the girls who would kill to be Miranda Priestly’s second assistant one last time. Hell, even Miranda’s going through it in the upcoming Devil Wears Prada sequel.

What next for Condé Nast—and cultural institutions like it—when there’s so little discernible shared culture? Well, this might just be their time to shine, if they play their cards right. We’re already overrun with content thanks to algorithms and platforms that make it possible for everyone to bring their art to the world.

For all the nostalgia for the economic largesse of the golden age of magazines, all the attention suddenly paid to Condé Nast is likely also a result of looking around and realizing that there’s no one curating any of this. And for all the dangers that gatekeeping presents (cough, racism, ahem, sexism), there is a future for smart, thoughtful curation of words, art, and images that help audiences sift through an unending barrage of newness.

DIGESTIF

What Books Are Publishers Betting On Now by Karin Gillespie | Substack

This one’s for the fellow publishing nerds. Karin Gillespie periodically takes an inventory of the genres of books and profiles of authors signed with major publishers whose deals have been recently announced in Publishers Marketplace. It’s one of the more fascinating (and useful!) reads from Lit-world Substack and we’re happy to see it every time it pops up.

Pragmatic works with a select list of American and international film & television clients, helping them find, acquire, and develop books and other intellectual property—articles, life rights, podcasts, video games, theater…and so much more—for the screen. If you’re interested in working with us and being plugged into a global, curated IP platform, we’d love to hear from you! Send us an email.